Lady Vanishes

Year: 1938

Grade: B

Country: UK

Director: Hitchcock

Review

stylistically speaking it’s a sort of unconventional hitchcock film. actually i take that back – it’s indicative of his early work, but unconventional relative to his later, more well known, work. i don’t know what film acted as his pivot from the old style hitchcock to the new, but it probably happened around the time he moved from the UK to the USA (1940). this film is similar to later films like rear window, lifeboat and rope that find the majority of the film taking place in a setting of limited space. in rear window it was an apartment complex, lifeboat was on a lifeboat at sea, rope was in a penthouse apartment, and this film took place primarily on a train. i like the technique because of the claustrophobia that it provides – in all of these settings there is no escape for the characters. the film showed some elements of later hitchcock. one scene after the protagonist gets clunked on the head comes to mind. hitchcock blurs the screen a bit and superimposes different images on each other to create a dazed effect. he’s big on using imagery of this sort to disorient the viewer, or at least to convey the feeling of disorientation. it’s a similar style to the one he employs when he shoots one of his famous dream sequences. the salvador dali collaboration in “spellbound” is the one that most quickly comes to mind. at any rate, this film is as intriguing as most of his work and shot with enough style to keep me interested in that respect. it doesn’t show the same level of visual ambition that he demonstrated at his peak (vertigo), but it’s a well-written and well-executed film nonetheless.